WHY KARI LAKE IS THE NEXT REPUBLICAN STAR:
As a local news anchor in Phoenix for 20 years, she entered the race with built-in name recognition and a reservoir of credibility that have stood her in good stead. It’s a little as if Walter Cronkite, back when network anchors were still near the height of their powers, up and decided to jump in the Democratic primary against President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
Then, there’s the fact that Lake loves the microphone and camera, and they love her back. She has communication skills that an army of consultants could never impart to a candidate with less experience. Lake has basically had more than 20 years of media training, and it shows.
At a rally with Tulsi Gabbard this week that involved a sit-down conversation with the former Democratic congresswoman on stage, Lake could have been mistaken for the celebrity MC. She was fluid and in control. Not a word was out of place. She seamlessly interwove pleasant chitchat with her campaign message, which, with an emphasis on the border, education and water issues, hardly sounded radical.
TV news-anchoring is about connecting with the viewers and projecting authority, and these are attributes that are directly transferable to the political realm. If you seem unflappable, people will think you are unflappable, and that creates a sense of command.
Lake has made a point of snapping back at the media constantly. Knowing how valuable these exchanges are for motivating Republicans, her campaign is careful to get them on video and spread them widely. The latest such moment had Lake taking a question about her election denialism from a reporter and turning it around by citing chapter and verse regarding Democrats denying the legitimacy of Republican presidential victories since 2000. This doesn’t excuse anything Lake has said, but it showed moxie — and in how she pulled it off — practiced showmanship.
On top of all of this, she is running against perhaps the worst Democratic gubernatorial candidate in the country, the Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, whose campaign is currently consumed with trying to justify her refusal to debate Lake. Hobbs emphatically lacks Lake’s star power and in fact, feels more like a candidate for the board of the Central Arizona Water Conservation District than the highest elected office in the state.
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